3

After running the an update from the update-manager I tried to install chromium:

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

And I got the following error (full output from `sudo apt-get update' on Ubuntu Pastebin):

Reading package lists... Error!
E: Malformed 2nd word in the Status line
E: Error occurred while processing curl (UsePackage3)
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/dpkg/status
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

Working from this answer I guessed there was something wrong with my MergeList. So per the top answer, I removed the Merge List.

 sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf

Then I attempted an update.

 sudo apt-get update

And got the same set of error messages.

My next thought was that one of the repos I had added was faulty in some manner. /etc/apt/sources.list was full on Canonical sources and nothing else. etc/apt/sources.list.d had a few 3rd party sources I had added (namely heroku and Chris Lea's node.js). Just in case I cleared out that directory with sudo rm *. Then deleted the MergeList, and attempted an update. Same error.

What might be causing this set of errors and how do I correct it?

Community
  • 1
nelsonda
  • 623

1 Answers1

1

It appears that /var/lib/dpkg/status got corrupted. The solution was to restore from /var/lib/dpkg/status-old. Before you do that though, read the full answer.

Thanks to Lucio and Soroosh129 for pointing me to the solution.

Community
  • 1
nelsonda
  • 623